W.E.B. Du Bois: “One hears the hiss of lightnings, the deep thunder of human things, and a fevered breathing as of some attendant and…”

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.